Insight and highlights from the VMware Fusion Team for running Windows on your Mac

Category Archives: upgrade

And with the biggest sale of the year going on right now, there’s never been a better time to get up to date if you’re on Fusion 7 or older.

Today we’ve released an update to our favourite Mac virtualization product to address some critical stability issues on certain configurations of macOS 10.12. Users would get an ‘internal error’ message and Fusion would quit unexpectedly. This release fixes that issue.

Users can download the update from within the product by clicking ‘Check for Updates’, or you can grab the raw bits right from vmware.com/go/getfusion

It’s also the perfect time to update to the latest supported version of our most popular products with our Cyber Monday sale going on all week.

It’s nearly that time again… Black Friday and Cyber Monday are quickly approaching!

We’re going to have our award winning virtualization products on sale at huge discounts just in time for the holidays.

If you had been holding off upgrading to Fusion 8.5, our Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are the biggest discounts we offer all year, it’s the perfect time to get supported under macOS Sierra and Windows 10 Anniversary (which has been called ‘the most secure Windows to date‘.

In other news, we also just released a security patch to address a vulnerability demonstrated at this year’s PwnFest festival in Seoul, Korea last week. We patched the vulnerability in hours and pushed the release on Sunday to protect our users.

One of the new features of macOS Sierra people are talking about has been native tabs for apps, and let me tell you I’m pretty excited about it. Seriously, the folks in our office are probably getting tired of me geeking-out over this by now…

Our users have been asking us for this feature for a while, and we had heard wind that Apple was going to open this up so we didn’t have to figure out a custom implementation. Good things come to those who wait =)

This feature is something I think “other Mac-based virtualization tools” will have a hard time doing…

Part of our design philosophy is to consistently use native UI elements wherever possible. This ethos applies not only to Fusion, but also to Workstation and Player where we have native UI for Linux built on GTK, for example.

In the case of OS X / macOS, we have always had a better time when we implement things that are standard UI elements within the Apple ecosystem. This year our design philosophy really pays off with our ability to natively support multiple running VM’s in a tabbed interface on macOS Sierra.

So, by upgrading to Fusion 8 and macOS Sierra, users will just get this feature by default. Yes, I said Fusion 8 😉

Enabling it is pretty simple, even if it is a little different than how you’re used to opening tabs in Safari or Finder.

With Fusion you need to have 2 or more VMs open (the Library Window does not count).

With the VM window active, go to the Window menu and click ‘Merge All Windows’.

There’s no fancy animation yet, and I expect Apple will probably add that later on.

So for folks using more than 1 VM, this is a pretty exciting feature!

We have more surprises in store for this year’s release, and with VMworld looming we’re getting very excited, and can’t wait to share the news! Stay tuned!

Hot off the heels of WWDC, Apple has made available the next major update to it’s flagship operating system for Mac. With a new name, macOS, Apple seems to be getting away from the OS X moniker and aligning with the rest of the OS’s that it has in it’s bag: tvOS, iOS, watchOS, and now macOS.

Users have been excited to run this in a VM to test, but it doesn’t “just work” in Fusion yet unfortunately. The reason is that Developer Preview builds have debugging code included which changes the memory layout of the installer. We specifically require a certain block layout of the .app to create the bootable install image, but because the layout is different due to debugging code, it fails with an ‘Internal Error’.

There are 2 ways to get around this:

Install 10.11 and upgrade it to 10.12

Manually create the bootable install image and attach it to an empty 10.11 VM.

The first one is pretty easy, and you can make an OS X 10.11 VM using the recovery partition with just a couple of clicks from File > New.

Once it’s up and you’ve installed VMware Tools, you can drag the ‘Install 10.12 Developer Preview.app’ onto the desktop of your 10.11 VM, double-click it and begin the install.

For folks that don’t have the time or who want to walk through a fresh installation there is a multi-step method that I’ve written about here that will show you the way and explain what’s happening along the trip.

For folks who want to run Sierra on the Mac itself and use Fusion, there is a bit of a bug that we’re working on, but there’s an easy workaround.

Currently if you try to run a VM it will fail/crash with an ‘Internal Error’.

The simple work around for now is to disable 3D graphics acceleration (per-VM setting).

It’s possible that this ‘goes away’ when Apple moves to the public beta branch (it has different debugging code enabled than the developer previews), but we’ll be keeping a close eye on things as they develop and share what we learn.

Overall, I’ve found that macOS Sierra as a Host and as a Guest work pretty well. Siri tends to work better on the Host in my experience, so we’ll be examining how to make it a smooth experience in a VM as well. For now, my advice is to speak slowly to her when she’s ‘trapped’ in a VM 😉

(talking about AI with ‘he’ and ‘she’ is weird… welcome to the future!)

These releases mark a milestone achievement for our team within VMware, with fantastic new features and improvements in several areas including:

Windows 10
– Fusion 8 and Fusion 8 Pro provide full support for Windows 10. Use all the exciting new features like the Microsoft Edge browser, or Cortana the always-on digital assistant. Cortana even works when Fusion is in the background

Ready for OS X El Capitan
– Test the latest OS X release in a virtual machine to see what’s coming around the corner, or jump in with both feet and install OS X El Capitan on your Mac with the confidence that VMware Fusion 8 will still deliver the ultimate Windows on Mac experience.

All New Enhanced Graphics Engine with DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3.3

Everyday applications are smoother and more fluid, with new DirectX 10 only applications now supported.

Drive 14 million pixels with VMware Fusion 8 on the most powerful and beautiful iMac to date.

Building upon this great release, Fusion 8 Pro additionally delivers:

Native vCloud Air integration

Use vCloud Air, the public cloud service by VMware, to upload workloads to the cloud for public consumption. Build an app or web server locally and push it to the cloud with a simple drag and drop. Use it to connect with remote virtual machines running in vCloud Air, or even upload an existing virtual machine from Fusion for backup to the cloud.

$600 in free vCloud Air service credit

To help users get started, we’re happy to provide more then enough service credit to get users exploring what they can do with a compatible cloud.Improved vSphere integration

With deeper integration into VMware vSphere, Fusion 8 Pro now provides more detail than every before, and can even create remote virtual machines on ESXi or vCenter Server instances.

VMware Fusion 8 and VMware Fusion 8 Pro are available immediately for download and purchase from vmware.com for $79.99 and $199.99 respectively. VMware Fusion 8 Pro is also available from VMware partners and distributors.

Customers who have purchased VMware Fusion 7 or VMware Fusion 7 Pro between July 29, 2015 and August 25, 2015 are eligible for an electronic upgrade to VMware Fusion 8 or VMware Fusion 8 Pro at no additional cost. Qualifying customers will automatically receive an email advising how to upgrade their license keys.

VMware Fusion 6 and 7 customers can upgrade to VMware Fusion 8 for only $49.99 and to VMware Fusion 8 Pro for $119.99 at the VMware online store.